BeRCH role

Co-Investigator and collaborator to take a lead on gut microbiome assessments.

Personal Bio

DR. RAVINDER NAGPAL, MSc, PhD, is the Director of The Gut Biome Lab and an Assistant Professor of Health, Nutrition, and Food Sciences at the Florida State University. He received his PhD in Food Microbiology from the National Dairy Research Institute (India) from 2004 to 2008. He subsequently undertook a 5-year research fellowship tenure at the Probiotics Research Laboratory, Juntendo University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan, where he investigated the ontogenesis of the pediatric gut microbiome and factors affecting the dynamics of this pioneering early-life microbial spectrum. Subsequently, he undertook a 3-year post-doctorate tenure at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, NC, USA, where he investigated the role of the microbiome in metabolic and neurocognitive health and diseases. As a researcher, he has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in high-impact scientific journals, with over 11,000 total citations (h-index >50; i10-index >110) in his areas of research i.e. gut microbiome, diet-biome interactions, gut-brain axis, probiotics, prebiotics, and food/dairy microbiology, besides editing one book on beneficial microbes and authoring several book chapters and popular articles. He has received several prestigious awards such as Young Investigator Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), Best Paper Awards from European Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology Hepatology & Nutrition (ESPGHAN), and Indian Dairy Federation (IDF); Young Researcher award from Yakult India Science Foundation; and Junior Researcher Scholarship from National University of Singapore. He serves on the editorial board of several esteemed journals including Frontiers in Nutrition, Frontiers in Microbiomes, Infection and Immunity, BMC Microbiology, and Nutrients, and provides ad-hoc reviewer services to many prestigious journals of national and international status. Dr. Nagpal is actively affiliated with a number of scientific organizations viz. Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), American Societies for Nutrition (ASN), The US Shock Society, Society of Critical Care Medicine, American Society for Microbiology (ASM), International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP), and Association of Microbiologists of India (AMI), and has presented his research work and delivered invited lectures at numerous scientific conferences around the world.